The Deste Prize, a €10,000 ($13,300) award given every two years to a Greek or Cypriot artist by collector Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation, has gone to Kostas Sahpazis.

Mr. Sahpazis was selected from among six shortlisted artists who also included Marianna Christofides, Ilias Papailiakis, Michail Pirgelis, Maria Theodoraki and Alexandros Tzannis.

Really impressive jury on this one:

– Dakis Joannou, president of the Deste Foundation
– John Bock, the excellent, inimitable artist
– Bice Curiger, director of the Kunsthaus Zurich
– Daniel Birnbaum, the director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm
– Michael Ringier, the collector
– Beatrix Ruf, the director and curator of the Kunsthalle Zurich

Announcing the prize on behalf of the jury, Ms. Buriger said the following:

We are very happy to announce that the prize is going to be awarded to Kostas Sahpazis for his complex sculptural work. A work, which is introducing an oscillating force into all sorts of defined categories of art and art history, while revolving around ideas of subtle destabilization. It seems that Kostas Sahpazis is at times creating a painting while piling up materials into delicately calibrated stacks, or accumulating objects that are and are not always what they pretend to be. Here the very concrete and the abstract meet. Drawings are made in space, sometimes reflecting ‘figurative’ elements like a citation or a portrait of the surrounding world and blurring their meaning.

 

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